Outcomes Over Output: Why customer behavior is the key metric for business success

by Josh Seiden

an outcome is a change in human behavior that drives business results.

outcomes are the changes in customer, user, employee behavior that lead to good things for your company, your organization, or whomever is the focus of your work.

if features don’t automatically create value, then it follows that we shouldn’t use them as the center of our planning process.

Outcomes, or the human behaviors that drive business results, are what happen when you deliver the right features.

To see if our work is actually making a difference, we need checkpoints that are smaller, measurable, and more closely connected to the work that we’re doing. That’s where outcomes are important.

impact-level targets are too complex to be useful to our teams. Instead, we need to ask our teams to work on outcomes—the smaller, more manageable targets that, taken together, will create the impact we want. We do this by asking them to focus on changing customer behavior in a way that drives business results.

you can manage a team by telling them what to make: that’s called managing outputs. It’s a problem because features don’t always deliver value. You can manage a team by asking them to target some high-level value, like growing revenue. That’s called managing impact. It’s a problem because it’s not specific enough.

ask teams to create a specific customer behavior that drives business results. That allows them to find the right solution, and keeps them focused on delivering value.

MVP is just a buzzword that means “experiment.”

To find the right outcomes to work on, we start with a simple question: “what are the customer behaviors that drive business results?”

because outcomes are things people do, they’re both observable and measurable.

What are the user and customer behaviors that drive business results? (This is the outcome that we’re trying to create.) How can we get people to do more of those behaviors? (These are the features, policy changes, promotions, etc that we’ll do to try to create the outcomes.) How do we know that we’re right? (This uncovers the dynamics of the system, as well as the tests and metrics we’ll use to measure our progress.)

OKRs can be improved if you think of the Key Result as an outcome.